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INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science
Department of History, Politics and Philosophy
Politics Section
POLITICAL THEORY SINCE 1918.(AMERICAN EMPIRE)
ESSAY TOPIC- 1. What are the most important political messages of Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution?
11) 3000 WORDS ( USE MANY REFERENCE)
11) it is CRUCIAL to show an engagement with the main text relevant to your essay. (i.e. if your essay is about Hannah Arendt, On Revolution.)
SOME READING LIST
READING LIST.
GENERAL;
Mark Lilla; The Reckless Mind. NB Chapters on Arendt, Schmitt and Foucault.
Richard Wolin; Labyrinths. NB chapters on Arendt and Schmitt.
Tracy B Strong. Politics without Vision. This has chapters on Arendt and Schmitt that are very advanced. Perhaps read them after reading introductory material and the texts themselves. Strong’s chapter on Lenin may be useful as background on Gramsci, and his chapter on Heidegger –whilst complex- may have some use for your work on Schmitt.
Yvonne Sherratt; Hitler’s Philosophers. This has the rather traditional chapters on Schmitt and Arendt. It is rather less theoretical than Wolin and Strong, and can be used for biographical summaries.
ARENDT
At the very least you are going to have to read Arendt’s On Revolution. There are copies in the MMU library (there are of all the books on this list). However, I’d advise you to pick up the Penguin edition of this text by her.
Other books by Arendt I refer to include;
The Origins of Totalitarianism (be AWARE of which edition you are looking at – none are “wrong” but each one has slightly different contents.)
The Human Condition
They are both in the library, and while I don’t advocate that you read them as a matter of course, you may wish to follow up on some of the issues we look at the lectures by a consideration of them.
Another of her books, easily accessible in a Penguin edition is Eichmann in Jerusalem. I don’t really use it in this unit, but you may wish to look at it.
The best ‘text book’ on Arendt is
Margaret Canovan; Hannah Arendt; a reinterpretation of her political thought.1992. (Check that this book is the one you are reading and not her earlier book on Arendt.)
Hanna Pitkin; The Attack of the Blob is very useful on the concept of the Social in Arendt.
SeylaBenhabib’sThe Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt is also well worth looking at.
The best biography of Arendt is;
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl; Hannah Arendt: For love of the world. Read the second edition, 2004, as this contains fully adequate material on the relationship with Heidegger.
Two articles by Arendt you should be able to access via the University website;
“Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution”.Journal of Politics,February 1958,
“Ideology and terror; a novel form of government”.Review of Politics, July 1953.
On council communism;
C.L.R.James, Grace Lee and Pierre Chaulieu; Facing Reality
Richard Gombin; The Origins of Modern Leftism (BOTH parts of the chapter on Council Communism are important here.)
If you can get a look at Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, an infantile disorder, it is a jaundiced, but interesting insight into how Lenin saw Bordiga, Pannekoek and Gorter. Pannekoek’s work is worth chasing on the internet, especially any extracts from Workers’ Councils.
If you become interested in comparing the approaches of Arendt and Schmitt, you may want to look at the book by Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary. This considers Arendt, Schmitt and Max Weber. Much of section 3 is directly taken up with considering Arendt and Schmitt together.
SCHMITT
At the very least you are going to have to read The Concept of the Political, which is actually quite short. It’s worth getting hold of the University of Chicago Press paperback edition.
In terms of biography, the books to consider are;
GopalBalakrishnan; The Enemy (especially good for the early years and the ‘Hindenburg/Schleicher’ period).
Jan-Werner Müller; A Dangerous Mind. (especially good for the post-Second World War years, but with a nice little summary of the early years.)
ReinhardMehring’sCarl Schmitt, a very highly rated German biography of Schmitt is now in the library for your use. This is the most complete biography, but be clear that it is extremely detailed and lengthy and therefore short summaries of leading books are not what it provides. So, perhaps a book for those who get fascinated by Schmitt.
On the Conservative Revolution; the chapter in Wolin (see “General” above) is useful, as are both Müller and Balakrishnan. For what this body of ideas was actually about check Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair.
For the “Mouffe” school of Schmitt studies, the following three books are useful
Chantal Mouffe (ed) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. Note in particular Paul Hirst’s “Carl Schmitt’s Decisionism”. This is SO important that it has been made into an electronic resource for you on moodle. You should probably read this before you read anything else to do with Carl Schmitt. It is a brilliant summary of many of the key points in a very straightforward style of writing.
Chantal Mouffe;On the Political. Important for showing you her personal approach to politics, based on Schmitt, but also for giving you some important pointers on Schmitt’s approach in the second chapter.
Chantal Mouffe; Agonistics. This recent (late 2013) book is –in my view- Mouffe’s clearest exposition of her own point of view. There isn’t a huge amount about Schmitt in there, but if you read carefully you’ll find his imprint on some of the key ideas.
One of the things we are going to consider is the impact of Schmitt on the Left, and the Mouffeschool is one example. From another part of the Left, another massively influential example of Schmitt impacting Left politics is Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, whose title name-checks one of Schmitt’s key concepts.
GRAMSCI
The key text is, of course, The Antonio Gramsci Reader (ed. David Forgacs). This includes material from the Prison Notebooks and the earlier, published political writings. It contains all the material I’ll be referring to. This is your starting point in reading Antonio Gramsci himself, and if you have worked all the way through this in detail, you’ll have made a great start.
There are biographies of Gramsci available (Alistair Davidson’s and GuiseppeFiori’s, both of which will be found by searching under “Antonio Gramsci” in the MMU library catalogue). The one I would suggest you search out to get a feel for where Gramsci was coming from, and for the events that forged him is Gwyn Williams’ Proletarian Order, which covers the years between 1911 and 1921 in a committed, passionate and leftist style. Read it in conjunction with the appropriate sections of the reader.
For introductory texts, I’d suggest Carl Boggs’ Gramsci’s Marxism and Roger Simon Gramsci’s Political Thought. Simon’s is a prime example of what we can call the “Eurocommunist” reading of Gramsci (as his Marxism Today article from 1977, “Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony” which I’ll put onto moodle.) Boggs offers a quasi-libertarian socialist reading of Gramsci in which Gramsci seems to offer us a sort of alternative to Leninism within Marxism. For Boggs, parties like the Italian Communist Party of the 1970s are pale shadows of what Gramsci wanted; one suspects that for Simon the story was very different. Jules Townshend’s section on Gramsci in his chapter on Eurocommunism in The Politics of Marxism will give you some ideas of how more Leninist Marxists would approach Gramsci.
Perhaps less “introductory” than these texts, but an extremely interesting and accessible study of Gramsci is Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s Gramsci’s Political Thought. Published in 2012, this book, among other things, tries to think about contemporary neo-liberalism using the prism of Gramsci’s thinking, and also has an essay applying Gramsci to the author’s own country, Brazil. A really useful aspect of this book is the way it draws on non-English language debates around Gramsci, including some from Italy. It is very much a Marxist book, written from a position that is rather to the left of, say, Simon’s, but perhaps still quite similar to it in some ways. There has been something of an explosion of work on Gramsci in recent years and our library has examples of this, of which one is Coutinho’s book. Marcus Green’s edited collection Rethinking Gramsci from 2011 (available via the library as an e-book).is another. Among other examples that have been ordered and should be in the library either in hard or electronic form by the time we get onto Gramsci are; Mark McNally (ed) Antonio Gramsci, Guido Liguori Gramsci’s Pathways, and Derek Boothman’s edition of Gramsci’s pre-prison letters, A Great and Terrible World.
Developing things further, Ernesto Laclau and ChantalMouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy gives a good guide to the concept of Hegemony in Gramsci and elsewhere and develops it in wholly new directions, and was a founding text for the Postmarxist school. Two critics of Gramsci are Richard Day in Gramsci is Dead (his argument is that attempts to seek a counter-hegemony using Gramsci as a guide are questionable) and James C Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance, an anthropological text that argues that as a guide to empirical reality, the theory of hegemony is not particularly useful.
Another recent example of the way that Marxists are still working with Gramsci can be found in the article by Peter D Thomas, “Hegemony, passive revolution and the modern Prince” in the Australian Socialist journal (that we take in MMU library and which is available online) Thesis Eleven. (117 (1) 20-39, 2013). Maybe one to read in conjunction with Coutinho’s book.
Foucault.
There are three biographies that we can mention here; James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault, David Macey’sThe Lives of Michel Foucault, and also Macey’s shorter, and later Michel Foucault.Macey’sLivestends to be preferred by the Focuauldians. Miller’s book does focus in no small measure on Foucault’s private life and runs with a concept of ‘limit-experience’ as key to Foucault that some have disputed.That said it seems as genuinely affectionate to its subject in its way as Macey’s writing is in his way. The short book by Macey, Michel Foucault, is an absolutely superb little read.
Books by Foucault that you’ll be wanting to read in part or whole; quite a few I’m afraid. Firstly, Discipline and Punish, for the chapter on Panopticism. The Foucault Reader (ed Paul Rabinow) for the section on Bio-power. The Foucault Effect (ed Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller) especially for Colin Gordon’s superb chapter on Governmental Rationality, as well as Foucault’s lecture on “Governmentality”. (Check out moodle for these pieces.)
You should try to have a look at some of the College de France lectures. The two I’d suggest you may want to spend some time with would be – especially – The Birth of Biopolitics,(perhaps most of all for the material – copious – on economic and neo-liberalism) and also perhaps Society must be defended (the material on Hobbes is rather useful).
Finally, Sara Mills’ Routledge Critical Thinkers volume Michel Foucault is a very standard Foucauldian reading, but there are some important points well made in it. It is especially useful on the question of anti-humanism, which it explains clearly and well, and on Power, on which it gives a clear, Foucauldian reading.
On the important topic of Governmentality, Thomas Lemke’s Foucault, Governmentality and Critique (2012) ia available in the library. Lemke’s articles on Foucault are hard, but worth a look.
The issue of Foucault’s connections with neo-liberalism has become something of a ‘hot topic’ recently. Michael Behrent, the American scholar, has pioneered a controversial view on this, and with Belgian scholar Daniel Zamora has published an edited volume on the issue called Foucault and neoliberalism. This book is fairly critical in the latter stages of the lectures on Foucault.
Further to this theme, also dealing with Foucault and neo-Liberalism, see Terry Flew’s article “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and contemporary neo-liberalism debates”, Thesis Eleven, February 2012, pp. 44-65. This is actually quite useful for getting a handle on just what is meant by the word neoliberalism as such.
Finally, as evidence of Foucault’s continuing importance to contemporary thinking;Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon’s Liquid Surveillance is a product of the contemporary school of surveillance studies. It claims to be going “beyond Foucault” in various ways. But does it? I’m not convinced, but perhaps you will be. It came out in late 2013.
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